Board OK's 100-room hotel in Worcester's Gateway Park

WORCESTER — The Planning Board Wednesday night gave its stamp of approval to plans for a $10 million, 100-room Hampton Inn at Gateway Park.

The five-story hotel will be built at 65 Prescott St., adjacent to the Courtyard by Marriott at 72 Grove Street, north of Lincoln Square.

The parcel where the hotel will be built is where the Courtyard by Marriott is located.

Patricia Gates, a lawyer representing the hotel developer, said the property will be divided into two separate lots, with the new hotel having frontage on Prescott Street. The Courtyard by Marriott, meanwhile, has frontage on Grove Street.

The hotel developer is SXC Prescott Street LLC, a subsidiary of hotel developer XSS LLC, which has built and operates two hotels in the city — the Courtyard by Marriott on Grove Street and Residence Inn off Plantation Street.

SXC has built 28 hotels in New England and New York during the past 15 years.

Construction of a new hotel in the city is something city officials have been pushing hard for in recent years, especially after the closing of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the Lincoln Square area.

While Worcester is the second largest city in New England, city officials have said it has an insufficient number of hotels rooms, making it difficult to attract regional and corporate conferences here.

Worcester has less than 1,000 hotel rooms while Providence has 3,000, even though it has a smaller population.

"The city was actually the one that approach my client about building a hotel here because the feeling is that Worcester needs more hotel space," Ms. Gates said.

She said the hotel plans, which have been more than 18 months in the making, have been reworked in such a way that the developer will not have to go before the Zoning Board of Appeals to seek any zoning relief.

Contact Nick Kotsopoulos at nicholas.kotsopoulos@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @NCKotsopoulos